Jericho is just two towns over from our home in Huntington. I drove to Good Shepherd via Jericho Corners (rather than our normal route through Jericho Center with its iconic 1807 general store) so that I would pass by the Old Red Mill , home to the Snowflake Bentley museum. Just before the village I noticed the old pylons of an abandoned commuter rail bridge, which made me ponder how quickly modes of transit have come and gone in this country, and how peculiar some of our societal transportation choices have been. (I’ll follow up on this with a little blog post about the Cambridge branch of the Burlington & Lamoille RR.)

Good Shepherd lies between villages, a good two miles past Jericho Corners and a mile short of Underhill Flats. As you see in the picture, it’s right next to a Dollar General, which is ironic, because in my concert spiel about how Vermont’s village centers and downtowns are hanging on tenaciously to a lively sense of community despite many pressures to the contrary, I often include among these stresses “the dollar store on the edge of town”. (I chose not to say this in my Jericho concert.)

It happened that the following year would mark the 50th anniversary of the congregation as well as the retirement of Pastor Arnold Thomas, so we arranged for a concert in March to kick off the celebrations. To honor the occasion and to the substantial number of congregants who would be present, I took the opportunity to program some music related directly and indirectly to the Lutheran tradition.

As I told the assembled audience/congregation: I’m not a Lutheran; my people are still stuck on the first reformation of our Mosaic tradition, the one undertaken by the Apostle Paul 1500 years earlier. We have a couple of questions about that.

Nonetheless, I find much to admire in the reforms of Martin Luther. One of his major criticisms of the Catholic church of his day was the indirect nature of the relationship between humans and God. The priesthood acted as intermediaries, and not just in confession: in Mass, only the priests prayed; only the choir of clerics sang; and they did all this in Latin, so the assembled laity did not even understand what was being said.

Luther most famously addressed this by translating the Bible into the vernacular and conducting worship entirely in German. But his musical reform was just as significant. It is not enough that people understand the words; like any good singalong leader, Luther understood that to get people to participate, you need simple, memorable, possibly familiar tunes—which he proceeded to gather from anyplace he could find them. He composed a number of enduring hymn tunes himself, making him one of the most-performed composers of all time. And he did not hesitate to use preexisting vernacular tunes, including drinking and bawdy songs; evidently he felt there were no sinful melodies, only inappropriate lyrics.

To illustrate Luther’s approach, I played Heinrich Isaac’s haunting melancholic song “Innsbruck”, followed by a Lutheran hymn using Isaac’s tune, as harmonized by the archetypical Lutheran composer J.S. Bach. Pastor Arnold, who has a stunning rich bass voice, joined me for two songs: as he pointed out, the tune of one, “The Star of the County Down”, aptly enough, was found in Good Shepherd’s hymnal. In proper Lutheran spirit, the entire audience joined in for the hymn “Joyful, Joyful”, which takes as its tune the choral theme from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. I also had the pleasure of accompanying Vermont’s Freedom and Unity Chorus, many of whose members live in Jericho. Of course I had to play my “Happy Birthday Martin”, composed to honor Martin Luther King Jr. And as always there was the numerically appropriate Scarlatti sonata.